How Artificial Intelligence, Data,and Messaging PlatformsAre Defining the Future of Work ―Ronald Ashri

The AI-PoweredWorkplace

THE AI-POWERED WORKPLACE

HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, DATA, AND MESSAGING PLATFORMS ARE DEFINING THE FUTURE OF WORK

Ronald Ashri

The AI-Powered Workplace: How Artificial Intelligence, Data, and

Messaging Platforms Are Defining the Future of Work

ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-5475-2 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-5476-9https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5476-9

Copyright © 2020 by Ronald Ashri

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Printed on acid-free paper

Ronald AshriRagusa, Italy

To Katia, Sofia, and Leo.

Contents

Part I: Understanding AI � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Chapter 1: The Search for Thinking Machines� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3

Chapter 2: What Is AI?� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 15

Chapter 3: Building AI-Powered Applications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31

Chapter 4: Core AI Techniques � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 41

Chapter 5: Core AI Capabilities� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 59

Part II: The Applications of AI in the Workplace� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 73

Chapter 6: The Digital Workplace � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 75

Chapter 7: AI Is the New UI� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 83

Chapter 8: Conversational Collaboration Platforms � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93

Chapter 9: Conversational Applications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 107

Part III: Building Your AI-Powered Workplace� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 129

Chapter 10: From Data to Understanding � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 131

Chapter 11: Defining an AI Strategy� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 143

Chapter 12: The Ethics of AI-Powered Applications � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 161

Chapter 13: Epilogue� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 173

Index � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 177

About the Author � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � vii

Acknowledgments � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �ix

Introduction � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �xi

About the Author Ronald Ashri is always trying to find a balance between his appreciation of academic rigor and his attraction to the necessary chaos of creating practical, usable tools. This split also describes his working life, from PhD student to research fellow to a technically focused entrepreneur and consultant. For the past 15 years he has been either building products in startups or working for organizations such as BT Labs, the NHS, TripAdvisor, the Italian Government, the UK government, UCLA, McGill University, and BDO to help them build useful products. Most recently he is the cofounder of a conversational AI consultancy called GreenShoot Labs, based in London, and leading the development of an open source conversational application manage-ment platform called OpenDialog.ai.

Ronald specializes in AI systems design, knowledge management, agent-based systems, and conversational AI.  He frequently writes and speaks about AI-related issues, has authored and coauthored a variety of articles (both academic and not) on AI as well as wider software engineering issues, and is the coauthor of a book titled Agent-Based Software Development (Artech House Publishers, 2004).

He holds a BSc (First Class) in Computer Systems Engineering from Warwick University and a PhD in Computer Science from Southampton University.

AcknowledgmentsHuge thanks to Shiva for getting in touch with the idea of writing a book. Quite simply this would not have happened if she did not kick-start the pro-cess. Rita Fernando and Shivangi Ramachandran from Apress have been a huge help throughout the entire process, gently nudging along and encouraging where required or equally gently but more directly telling me to “get it done” where that was required! Thanks to both of you for your patience and enthu-siasm throughout.

I got involved with AI because of Prof. Michael Luck. A little over 20 years ago I walked into his office at Warwick University to meet the lecturer who would be my tutor. From that first day, through supervision of my PhD degree, to research work afterward, and then on to a long friendship, he has always given me invaluable advice, support, and help.

Tim Deeson, my cofounder at GreenShoot Labs, is the person to whom a lot of the ideas in this book should be attributed. It is through countless discus-sions with him about conversational applications and AI and the challenges of introducing new ideas in organizations that the concepts got their current shape and form. Thanks for the trust he showed in me from the start.

Ultimately, however, none of this would have been possible for me without the unquestioning support, enthusiasm, and love of my wife Katia and the love and joy that our children, Sofia and Leo, bring to us daily. Thanks to the three of you for your patience while I locked myself away and wrote, and your sup-port as I went through the ups and downs of this process.

IntroductionWhat does the phrase “The AI-powered workplace” mean? Is it a blatant attempt to ride a wave of interest in artificial intelligence (AI) or does it describe a set of tools, techniques, and methods that can provide real value and lead to a different kind of workplace? In a broader sense, are we at the start of a fundamental shift in how office work is done, with AI as one of the central pillars, or are we in the throes of the latest fad?

Unsurprisingly, I don’t think that AI is a fad. I believe that we are at the start of what will be a far-reaching and fast-paced journey, one that will lead us to a radically different workplace from what we’ve had for most of the second half of the 20th century and a good chunk of the 21st.

The tools to help us get there are broadly, and confusingly, referred to as AI technologies. These technologies will prove to be a fundamental game-changer in how we do work. Indeed, AI will be a significant game-changer in all aspects of life, from manufacturing to agriculture and from healthcare to, sadly, also warfare.

Our focus for this book, however, will stick to the office. We will explore what changes are already underway and which are next on the horizon. These changes will affect the type of work we do when we are staring at a computer screen (and how we will hopefully be doing much less staring as time goes by) and coordinating with our coworkers to get things done. More specifically, we will explore how the rise of messaging and collaboration plat-forms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Facebook Workplace provide fertile ground for the growth of increasingly more sophisticated applications that work with us in a proactive manner to help us solve problems. These messag-ing platforms or, as we will more appropriately term them later on, conversa-tional collaboration platforms, will turn into the operating system of our digital workplace. Understanding how AI and these platforms intersect can provide you with a jump-start toward an AI-powered workplace.

The goal of this book is very practical: to equip you with a solid understanding of what AI is and provide you with decision-making tools that will allow you to chart a plan of action for your team that takes into account and exploits what AI technologies coupled with messaging platforms can offer.

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The book is divided into broadly three sections. First, we provide an introduc-tion to AI and a way to think of AI-powered applications that will stand us in good stead now and in the future. We then turn our focus to the application of AI in the workplace, with a specific emphasis on how conversational col-laboration platforms motivate and facilitate the introduction of AI-powered applications. Finally, we deal with the strategic thinking that is required to help you build your own AI-powered workplace by looking at useful principles and methods to develop strategies around data and AI in general. We close with a look at the ethical issues that are raised by the use of AI and discuss some of the guidelines that are being developed to tackle those.

Understanding AIIn Chapter 1 we trace the rise of AI and its trusty friends Data and Processing Power. This will help us better appreciate why we are where we are now, what the critical phases were in getting here, and how those will influence future developments.

In Chapter 2 we tackle the big question. What is AI and how does it do what it does? Don’t worry; I am not about to put on a philosopher’s hat and ponder the meaning of intelligence. My goal is to provide a set of practical ways of thinking about AI, demystifying the technologies and allowing you to recog-nize what can be practically useful in your situation. In particular, I will describe a way of thinking about what AI-powered applications do that is separate and distinct from the techniques that they use to achieve it.

Equipped with an understanding of what AI is, in Chapter 3, we look at what it means to build an AI-powered application. We look at what it takes to come up with a model of reasoning that will empower automated decision-making. In particular, we explore two distinct approaches: model-driven AI techniques and data-driven techniques. Both are required for complete appli-cations, so it is useful to have a clear understanding of the implications, ben-efits, and disadvantages of each.

Chapters 4 and 5 build on the framework introduced in Chapter 3. They are the most “technical” chapters, in that they provide us with an overview of the range of AI techniques and capabilities currently available and widely used. The purpose of these chapters is to give us a handle on various terms we will inevitably encounter, such as supervised or unsupervised learning and natural language processing, so that they can be considered in the context of solutions.

Introduction

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Applications of AI in the WorkplaceIn Chapter 6 we take a brief look at what we mean by the “digital workplace.” This helps define the space we will be looking at when thinking of applications of AI in the workplace and strategies of how to transform that workplace.

In Chapter 7 we consider interface paradigms. The way we interact with digi-tal machines is changing as digital machines are able to support richer and more natural interactions. Whether we are dealing with augmented reality; virtual reality; voice; or plainly but perhaps most effectively, text AI, plays a key role. Understanding how the rise of AI and the emergence of a new set of paradigms are interlinked is crucial in helping you understand how it may impact your workplace and why conversational collaboration platforms accel-erate the adoption of AI.

In Chapters 8 and 9 we take a deep dive into conversational collaboration platforms, their components, the considerations that come into play, and what it means to build chatbots, or better still, conversational applications. We examine how applications such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Facebook Workplace are not only changing how teams work, but also how automation and intelligent services can be introduced in the workplace. We outline a few different ways of thinking about conversational applications and provide an overall conceptual framework that ties it all together.

Building Your AI-Powered WorkplaceThe goal of the last three chapters is to provide us with some practical and directly actionable ways to approach the strategic development of our AI-powered workplace.

In Chapter 10 we discuss data, what role it plays, how various challenges around it can be approached, and through a practical example give some directions of how you can develop your own data strategy. We eschew con-sultancy-speak, with lofty visions and fancy terms focusing instead on prag-matic steps you can take.

In a similar fashion, Chapter 11 looks at useful elements to consider when devising a wider strategy for AI applications. Once more, the objective is to provide actionable insights that recognize that each organization needs to develop their own strategy, specific to their own context. As such we look at overarching principles and a set of methods that I have seen work successfully in the past.

Finally, in Chapter 12 we look at the ethical considerations of building AI applications. We start by explaining why these issues need to be considered specifically and explicitly within the context of AI-powered applications and then consider overall guidelines to get us started on the process. These are

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crucial issues, and it is down to our individual and collective responsibility to ensure that we critically consider them as we introduce increasing levels of automation and autonomy in our teams.

In all, I hope this is going to be an interesting journey for everyone. If you have never dealt with AI subjects before, this should give you a solid primer and a way to start taking practical actions while researching further. If you have some experience, this book could help round out some specific subjects and give you a couple of different perspectives on how to consider AI tools in the context of conversational platforms, as well as how to go about defining an approach that you can apply in your own organization.

Introduction

Understanding AI

PA RT

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© Ronald Ashri 2020R. Ashri, The AI-Powered Workplace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5476-9_1

C H A P T E R

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The Search for Thinking MachinesThe wish to construct machines that can perform tasks just like us or better than us is as old as our ability to reason about the world and question how things work.

In the Iliad, when Thetis goes to ask Hephaestus for replacement armor for her son Achilles, Homer describes Hephaestus’s lab as a veritable den of robotics. There are machines on tripods whose task is to attend meetings of the gods (yes, even the gods hated going to meetings themselves), robotic voice-controlled assembly lines, and robots made out of gold to help their master.

They were made of gold but looked like real girls and could not only speak and use their limbs but were also endowed with intelligence and had learned their skills from the immortal gods. While they scurried around to support their lord, Hephaestus moved unsteadily to where Thetis was seated.1

1 Iliad 18, 418-422.

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Building robots was the job of gods. They breathed life into machines. Homer was telling us that the ability to create thinking machines could bestow on us god-like status.

The challenge we had back then, and still have, is understanding exactly how we might go about building such machines. While we could imagine their existence, we didn’t have the tools or methods that would allow us to chart a path to an actual machine. It is no wonder that very often when solutions were imagined, they included secret potions and alchemy that would magically breathe life into Frankenstein-like figures not entirely under our control.

Step by step, though, we have put some of the pieces of the puzzle together. At the mechanical level, humans managed to build very convincing automa-tons. Through clever tricks, the creators of these automatons even fooled people into believing they were magically endowed with intelligent thought. From the ancient Greeks to the Han dynasty in China, the water-operated automatons of al-Jazarī in Mesopotamia, and Leonardo da Vinci’s knight, we have always tried to figure out how to get mechanical objects to move like real-life objects while tricking the observer into thinking there is an intelligent force within them causing action.

From a reasoning perspective, we went from the beginnings of formal reason-ing, such as Aristotle’s syllogisms, to understanding how we can describe complex processes through algorithms (the work of al-Khwārizmī around 820 A.D.), through to Boole’s The Laws of Thought, which gave us formal mathe-matical rigor.

Nevertheless, we were still woefully ill-equipped to create complex systems. While lay people could be fooled through smoke and mirrors, the practitio-ners of the field knew that their systems where nowhere near close to the level of complexity of human (or any form of natural) intelligence.

As advances marched on and we got to the 19th century, the field of computer science started taking shape. With Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and Ada Lovelace’s work on programming, the outlines of a path from imagination to realization started emerging. Ada Lovelace speculated that the Analytical Engine, with her programming, “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

By the end of the Second World War, we had progress in computing that was the result of efforts to build large code-breaking machines for the war, and the theoretical advances made by Alan Turing. A few years later (1950), Alan Turing even provided us with a test to apply to machines that claim to be able to think. The test calls for a human being to hold a conversation with a machine while a third observer is able to follow the conversation (by seeing

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what was said printed out). If the third observer cannot distinguish between the human and the machine, the machine passes the test.2

The path toward artificial intelligence was getting increasingly clearer.

The Birth of a New Field of StudyOn August 31, 1955 a group of researchers in the United States produced a brief document3 asking for funding for a summer research project. The open-ing paragraph is a testament to the unbounded optimism of humans and a lesson in what the phrase “hindsight is everything” means.

Here it is:

We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artif icial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

The most striking phrase, to a 21st century reader, is the very last one. It claims that a significant advance can be made after just a single summer of work. Keep in mind that this was with 1956 computing technology. The first integrated transistor was 4 years away. Computers occupied entire rooms and logic modules used vacuum tubes.

Now, to be fair, the group of scientists in question was exceptional. The pro-posal was co-signed by four very influential computer scientists. Claude Shannon, the father of information theory; Marvin Minsky, one of the first to build a randomly wired neural network; Nathaniel Rochester, the lead designer of the IBM 701, the first general-purpose, mass produced computer; and John McCarthy, widely credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence” and the creator of the Lisp programming language. If any group of people stood a chance of making a significant breakthrough in 1956, this was certainly it.

This meeting in Dartmouth is generally credited as the first conference on AI. It shaped academic thought around the range of issues to be dealt with in

2 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in Mind, volume LIX (236) (Oxford University Press, 1950) pp. 433–460.3 www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html

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order to create machines that exhibit intelligence. It also produced a lot of excitement and buzz and led to several years of funding for AI, largely based on the trust people had in people like Minsky to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.

Those golden (in an almost literal sense) years laid the foundations of the field of AI. From 1955 to the early 1970s, a whole range of subfields was created, and problems and their challenges stated. From different ways to reason to a start at natural language understanding, the first neural networks, and so much more, the field was booming.

As ever, however, buzz and excitement, unaccompanied by the results that people expected or predicted, led to what was known as the first AI winter. People, initially bedazzled by hyperbolic claims, were eventually disillusioned with AI and lost hope in its ability to produce results. AI was sidelined, funding was reduced, and focus turned to other issues.

It’s important to note that research in AI did not stop over this period. It may have been less visible to the public eye, and overall resources were reduced, but interest remained. Research grants used the term “AI” less often, but they were still trying to solve the same problems.

A Practical ApplicationIn the 1980s there was a resurgence. AI had found a problem that it could solve for businesses in a manner that was widely applicable and where returns were clear. By that time, several research groups, but in particular the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, came to the realization that instead of trying to create general problem solvers, they could instead focus on constrained domains that required expert knowledge. These expert systems used all the research that happened in the previous decades about how to codify knowl-edge and reason about it, and focused it on specific use cases within restricted domains.

Expert systems can broadly be described as the combination of codifying knowledge as a set of rules and creating an inference engine that can take in a description of the state of things and derive some conclusions. Roughly, you would have a collection of rules such as “If temperature is below 60°F, wear a warm coat” and relationships such as “A jacket is a type of coat.” Combining large numbers of such rules and relationships, expert systems can capture an expert’s highly complicated knowledge in a specific field and act as an aid to augment human-based expertise. By the mid-1980s there was a whole indus-try of companies focused on supplying technology to run expert systems. These software behemoths used programming languages such as Lisp to encapsulated knowledge, and used dedicated machines to be able to crunch through the rules.

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The iconic expert system example from the 1980s was called XCON (the eXpert CONfigurer), built for Digital Equipment Corporation. XCON’s job was to assist in the ordering of DEC computers. The inputs were the client’s requirements and the outputs were the necessary computer system compo-nents. XCON was built based on the knowledge of DEC’s experts and had around 2,500 rules. It ended up saving up to 25 million dollars a year because it processed orders with a higher level of accuracy (between 95% and 98%) than technicians, thereby reducing the number of free components DEC had to send out following a mistaken configuration.

With expert systems, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity; AI had found its killer feature, and business was booming again. Once more though, hype got the better of everyone. Big claims were made and, while a lot of useful soft-ware was built and was effectively being used, the expectations were set too high. As a result, that industry crashed and several companies disappeared. AI was in the doghouse once more.

What is a less-often mentioned feature of this second AI winter is that a lot of the industry (i.e., a lot of the money involved) was focused on building specialized machines able to run expert systems. It’s important to keep in mind that the PC industry was still confined to hobbyists at this time. What the expert systems industry did not foresee was the rise of PCs. They became popular and were recognized as valid and useful business machines, making the expensive expert systems machines seem less attractive.

Quite simply, there was no need for a large industry building actual computers to run expert systems, because people could get a lot done with normal and cheaper PCs. Business could do digital transformation in a much more agile way by introducing PCs.4 Giving everyone a word processor and a flexible number cruncher and letting them figure out how to make good use of them seemed like a much better way to invest money at the time. Part of the story, therefore, is that the technological landscape changed, and the AI industry failed to adapt quickly enough.

Businesses use technology to gain a competitive advantage. At the time, investing in large and complicated AI systems was risky. It made much more sense to bring the entire company up to date with computing technology and empower many more people within the company to benefit from general computing improvements.

Understanding these ebbs and flows is fundamental in learning to distinguish noise from signal. All through those 40 years (from the early 1960s to the early 2000s) capable people built capable software that solved real problems using AI. They also advanced the science of how we could solve complex

4 While they may not have used the terminology “digital transformation” and “agile” in the 1980s, that is exactly what they were doing by putting PCs in front of everyone.

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problems with computers. The battle was not really fought or measured in that respect. The AI winters or springs were measured in the ability of people to attract funding (which induces people into making lofty claims) and the competition AI had from other types of technologies vying for investment. By the early 1990s AI generally had a tarnished name, and there were so many new, exciting, and much more immediately applicable technologies to invest in (like a little something called the World Wide Web).

AI Goes into HidingAs a result of all of this, AI researchers devised a different survival strategy. Instead of saying they were working on AI, they would focus on talking about the specific subfield they worked in. A whole range of different fields emerged, from multiagent systems (the field I worked on as a PhD student and researcher) to knowledge management, business rules management, machine learning, planning, and much more. What we were all doing was trying to build machines that solve problems in a better way. We just stopped emphasizing the AI part that much. Even the researchers who were directly focused on the hardest task of them all, using computers to understand or recreate human behavior, labeled it as “cognitive computing” or “cognitive sciences” rather than calling it research in artificial intelligence.

In the background, gatherings such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (running every 2 years from 1969 to 2015 and now, inci-dentally, running yearly) remained. The people who were reticent to talk about AI on funding proposals still attended. Everyone knew they were work-ing on AI, but they would not necessarily hype it as much.

My own personal path to AI reminds me of just how much AI was out of favor. As an undergraduate at Warwick University, in 1999, I had to get “special” permission from the Computer Science department to attend a cognitive computing course because it was taught in the Psychology department! I ended up loading my undergrad studies with so many AI-related courses that I was called in to justify it as still a valid degree in Computer Science. Luckily, all the AI academics-in-hiding had my back and the argument was won. Fast-forward to 2019 and universities are rushing to introduce Artificial Intelligence degrees while academics are reclaiming titles such as Professor of Artificial Intelligence, when only 5 years ago they were “plain” Professors of Computer Science.

What all this helps illustrate and what is essential to keep in mind when you hear about AI having gone through cycles before and AI being just hype, is that AI is an extremely broad term. It is such a broad term that it is arguably close to useless—unless, that is, it captures the imagination of investors and the popular press. The problems it is trying to solve, however, can’t go away. They are real scientific questions or real challenges that humanity has to tackle.

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Separating the noise of the press and the hype that gets investors excited from what matters is crucial in approaching AI.  In the next section, I will explain why I think we have reached a point where talking about cycles of AI is not very useful, and in the next chapter we will get a better handle on what AI actually means.

The New Eternal SpringSince the late 2000s to now, 2019, excitement about AI feels like it has reached fever pitch and will need to settle down a bit. At the same time, a lot of other things have been happening in the world of technology and outside of it. These other elements have fundamentally changed the landscape once more.

This time around, unlike the 1980s, I believe that the way the landscape is changing is in favor of the long-term growth of AI and the growing industry of AI-related technologies. The changes are not only going to help spread AI, they are going to make AI a necessity. AI will stop being a novelty application that is occasionally introduced. Instead, it will be one of the fundamental pil-lars woven into the fabric of everything that we do.

We may call it different names and investors may lose interest once more, but the tools and the solutions to problems they provide will remain. We can already see this happening explicitly with smartphones, where dedicated chips for AI calculations are introduced. If those were switched off, we wouldn’t be able to even open the phones (face recognition) or type on them (predictive typing).

At the most basic level, there are at least three forces in play here that are going to necessitate the adoption of AI techniques:

1. We have an unprecedented increase in the amount of data we handle, and the need to carefully curate it and base decisions on it.

2. Processing power, which has followed Moore’s law for the past 50 years, is making it possible to apply complex algorithms to data. The performance of these algorithms for well-defined domains is equaling or surpassing human abilities. At the very least, these make the tools useful companions, augmenting human capabilities.

3. Cloud computing is making both storage and processing power widely available with an added layer of sophistication, so that anyone can access and make use of complex AI tools. Open source tooling is doing the same in terms of the lower level capabilities. AI is being democratized in a way that was never possible before.

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Flooded in DataThe first fundamental shift is the extent to which what we can do with data has changed. Data has always been produced. The question is whether it could be captured, stored, retrieved, and analyzed. In that respect, the past years have introduced magnitudes of change. We can now, very cost effec-tively, store huge amounts of data (although most of it is still unstructured data), and we can process huge chunks of the data that we do store.

It is hard to say exactly how much data we store daily. Here are some num-bers presented by IBM in 2018:

• 80,000,000 MRIs taken every year

• 600,000,000 forms of malware introduced daily

• 2,200,000,000 locations generating hyperlocal weather forecasts every 15 minutes

If you head over to internetlivestats.com, you will see a dizzying number of counters ticking up. When I checked it one mid-morning in September 2019 from Central Europe, the numbers that stood out were:

• Over 115,000,000,000 emails sent in the day already

• Over 35,000,000 photos uploaded to Instagram

• Over 3,000,000,000 searches on Google already

For once it is no exaggeration to use terms like “flooded” or “inundated” to describe the situation with data. According to research done by Raconteur, we are likely to reach 463 exabytes5 of data produced daily by 2025.6 That is going to be driven to a large extent by the increase in devices that are connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) in wearables, smart devices around the home, and in industry.

The AI opportunity is simply that humans can in no way, shape, or form expect to analyze even a tiny fraction of this data without automation. Applying large-scale data analysis to it is our only hope. Taking this a step further, we can also expect that unless we embed automated decision-making into systems, we will not be able to cope with the growth in demand for deci-sion making and action.

To consider some of the staggering needs humanity has, here is one example from education. According to goals adopted by the UN General Assembly, in

5 It is hard to capture just how much data 463 exabytes are. According to a 2003 report from Berkley University, all words ever spoken by human beings would take up about 5 exabytes. So we will be producing 93 times that data, a day, every day! (Peter Lyman and Hal R Varian, How Much Information?. Technical Report (Berkeley UC Berkeley, 2003).6 http://res.cloudinary.com/yumyoshojin/image/upload/v1/pdf/future-data-2019.pdf.

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order to meet a 2030 education goal of providing every child with primary and secondary education, an additional 69 million teachers will be needed across the world.7 As of 2018, there were 64 million teachers around the world8 (this is ignoring quality issues such as level of training of the teachers themselves). We would need to double the number of existing teachers worldwide in 12 years. To train enough teachers to meet our goals, we need a huge amount of support from technology to scale teacher training, scale pupil education, and more accurately measure results. All of this will depend on effectively managing data and automating processes, to allow human resources to focus on what they can do best—person-to-person interactions.

In China, a company called Squirrel AI has managed in 2 years to build over 700 schools for K–12 education, catering to over 1 million students.9 The entire system depends on sophisticated algorithms that are able to adapt a teaching program to a student’s individual needs. While it is healthy to be skeptical about how such systems will really impact children and education, we have to, at the same time, accept that the exploration of such solutions is the only way to manage a growing population and growing needs for education.

Raw Processing Power and Better AlgorithmsWhat do first-person shooter games and AI have in common?

Believe it or not, without the former we might not have had quite the resur-gence of the latter. In 2009, at the International Conference on Machine Learning, Raina et al.10 presented a paper on the use of graphics processors applied to large-scale deep belief networks. Raina’s research group at Stanford, led at the time by the now well-known Andrew Ng,11 figured out how to effectively use graphical processing units (GPUs), specifically through NVidia’s CUDA programming model, to dramatically decrease the time it took to train machine learning models by exploiting the parallelization afforded by GPUs. By that time, GPUs were so efficient and very cost-effective because of the

7 www.unesco.org/new/en/media-services/single-view/news/close_to_69_mil lion_new_teachers_needed_to_reach_2030_educat/.8 https://tellmaps.com/uis/teachers/#!/tellmap/1381436086.9 http://www.squirrelai.us/school.html.10 Rajatm Raina, Anand Madhavan, and Andrew Y Ng, “Large-Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors,” International Conference on Machine Learning (Montreal, Canada: 2009).11 Andrew Ng was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford, then became the director of Google Brain, cofounded Coursera, and led AI efforts at Baidu. In 2017 he left Baidu to create Deeplearning.ai (offering online AI classes) and Landing.ai, which is focus-ing on the use of AI in manufacturing.

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increase in sales of GPUs to power the needs of the computer gaming indus-try for, point in question, better graphics for first-person shooter games.

The use of GPUs, coupled with advances in algorithm design (in particular from Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto), led to a step change in the quality of results and the effort it took to arrive at those results.

In many ways, these two advances have released the genie out of the bottle. AI as an industry may suffer at some point, investors may complain, and we may not get all the things that are being promised. The techniques developed so far, however, will always be available, and because of their wide applicability they will always be used to solve problems—even more so as we see access to AI democratized through cloud computing and open source software.

The Democratization of AIUp until 2015, actually using AI technologies was generally hard. Unless you had AI experts in your team, you couldn’t realistically attempt to apply any of these technologies. A lot has changed since then.

In November 2015, TensorFlow12 (Google’s framework for building machine learning applications) was released as an open source tool. Since then, the open source space of AI tooling has exploded. Online courses abound, both paid for and free, and the main blocker to learning about AI techniques is your time availability and access to bandwidth.

In addition, by 2019 we have an unprecedented level of access to sophisti-cated machine learning services through simplified application programming interfaces. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and many others offer access to their tools, allowing organizations to upload data, train models, and deploy solutions within their applications.

Microsoft, in particular, talks directly about democratizing AI.13 The aim is to make it available to all software engineers in the same way database technolo-gies or raw computing power is available via cloud-based solutions.

The wide availability of these technologies as cloud solutions doesn’t just reduce the level of expertise required to implement an AI-powered applica-tion. It also reduces the amount of time it takes to go from idea to prototype to production-level roll-out. As we will see later on, the ability to iterate, experiment, and learn while doing is just as important as having the technolo-gies readily available.

12 www.tensorflow.org/.13 https://news.microsoft.com/features/democratizing-ai/.

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Moving ForwardIn the last section we laid out the case for why AI cannot simply disappear. Please note that this is not about the economics of the AI industry. It is not about the venture capitalists, startups, or large corporation and government politics of who gets more attention and funding. The argument is about the fundamentals of how the digital world is evolving and the needs of the analog world. The problems are getting bigger, and we are running out of ways to scale systems unless we introduce automation.

Whether it is agriculture, education, health, or work in the office, we cannot just keep working longer and stressing out more. Something has to give and something has to change. My hope is that what is going to change is more efficient use of technology to allow us to focus on what is more important. Yes, along the way we will go through booms and busts. However, do not confuse press coverage or funding news about unicorn startups with the fun-damentals. The goal of AI should not be to make us all more like machines or to create unicorn startups.

The goal of AI, as that of any technology, should be to lift us up from our cur-rent condition and give us back the time to explore what it means to be human.

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C H A P T E R

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What Is AI?Artificial intelligence (AI) is notoriously hard to define, and this has been both a boon and a curse. The broadness of the term has allowed for a very wide and disparate set of techniques to inhabit the same space, from data-intensive machine learning techniques such as neural networks to model-based deduc-tion logics, and from the incorporation of techniques from statistics to the use of psychological models of the mind. At the same time, all these attempts to emulate existing forms of intelligence or create new ones has allowed for debates to flourish about what is actual intelligence. While in some contexts these debates are useful, they can also be distracting and confusing. They can lead people to set expectations or express concerns about AI that are not founded in what the technology is currently capable of or what we can confi-dently say it will be capable of, but rather extrapolations that are based more on beliefs and hunches.

In this chapter we are going to focus on a more practical interpretation of AI. To set the scene, we start by briefly looking at one of the biggest traps of defining AI, what is often referred to as its magical “disappearing act.” We then distinguish between general AI and domain-specific AI, and move on to pro-vide a way of thinking of domain-specific AI that focusses on the what without concerning itself with the how. By focusing on outcomes and observable behavior, we can largely sidestep the problem of having to even use a term as fluid as intelligence, and certainly we will not be trying to pin it to a definition. Instead, we ground our thinking in how our organizational processes are affected by the introduction of software that has been delegated some aspect of decision-making and, by consequence, the automation of action. All of the aforementioned provides the necessary groundwork to support the next chapter around building AI-powered applications.

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AI’s Disappearing ActBased on what we saw about the history of AI in the previous chapter, it is reasonable to say that “artificial” in artificial intelligence refers to the fact that the origin of “intelligence” is the result of purposeful human effort, rather than natural evolution or some form of godly intervention. It is “artificial” only because we generally thought of intelligence as something that came from nature, whereas with AI we somehow trick nature and create it ourselves.

I like to think of it as very similar to synthetic elements in the periodic table. If you recall from your chemistry classes, synthetic elements are those that have been created artificially, that is, by humans. You generally will not find Einsteinium or Fermium lying around. What is important though, both for these synthetic elements and for AI, is that once created they are no less or more real than the elements (or the intelligence) that can be found in nature. In other words, artificial refers to the process of arriving to intelligence, not the final result.

What is intelligence then? This is about as open-ended a question as you can get, compounded by the fact that we make things worse for ourselves by constantly changing the target. Every time we build something that can do something that wasn’t possible before, from the simple calculator to beating chess grandmasters, or from winning at Jeopardy! to detecting cancer, that intractable problem we just made tractable gets declassified. The typical dia-log with the person claiming that something is not real intelligence broadly follows these outlines:

• It looked like it required intelligence to be solved, but I guess it doesn’t.

• Wait, what? So how is it solved now, if not by AI?

• Well it uses lots of computing and lots of algorithms, doesn’t it? There is nothing really smart or magical about it.

• …

The minute the trick is revealed, the spell is broken and it is magic no more. It’s sleight of hand, an elaborate trick, a more sophisticated version of a sing-ing bird automaton.

Perhaps this is a result of the fact that we don’t actually know where and how we get our own intelligence, combined with an innate sense of threat at any-thing claiming that it might be intelligent like us. After all, we are quite used

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to ruling the roost on this planet. Our own search for intelligence is the only thing that feels like it might threaten it.1 When we manage to solve problems we “thought” required intelligence, we demystify them, and that makes them less interesting. Until such a time when we have demystified the entire pro-cess, we can always retreat to higher ground and claim superiority.

For the day-to-day task of solving real problems, however, such discussions tend to distract and discourage. It ultimately doesn’t matter whether people call it intelligence or not. In the most banal of ways, it is the journey to get to the solution that matters. That journey takes us through the wide toolset that AI offers, and allows us to discover what techniques will work for our case. Whether we’ve solved a problem using “real” intelligence or not is a debate for existentialists. The fact on the ground is that we now have a tool that does something useful.

It is this practical view of AI that we will develop further in this chapter. Before we do so, however, we are going to distinguish between the search for general AI, which is definitely an existentialist pursuit, and domain-specific AI.

General AI vs. Domain-Specific AIAs we move toward a practical understanding of AI, so that we can use it to reason about how best to exploit it, it’s useful to start by distinguishing between artificial general intelligence (or strong AI) and domain-specific (or weak AI).

Strong AI refers to the effort to create machines that are able to tackle any problem by applying their skills. Just like humans, they can examine a situation and make best use of the resources at hand to achieve their objectives.

Take a moment to consider what that means. Say the objective is to prepare a cup of coffee. Think of doing that in a stranger’s house. You are let in, and then you scan the rooms trying to figure out where the kitchen might be. Years of prior experience tell you it is probably on the ground floor and toward the back of the house. At any rate, you can recognize it when you see it, right? You then look around for a coffee machine. Does it take ground cof-fee, beans, or soluble? Is it an Italian-style coffee maker, or a French coffee press? Where is the water? Where do they keep cups? Spoons? Sugar? Cream? Milk? We breeze through all these problems without a second thought.

1 Note that I said “feels like it might threaten it.” There is an intense debate about the risks AI poses to humanity from an existential point of view. That is one debate that this book will not try to tackle. However, I do urge everyone to consider the near-term risks stem-ming from the misuse of current day technology (a risk I consider urgent and present), as well as investigate carefully if there are any real long-term risks from sentient software taking over (risks I consider more of a thought exercise than, in any form, real).

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Now imagine having to build a machine that will do this. It would require navi-gation skills, machine vision skills, dexterity to handle different types of objects, and a library’s worth of rules on how coffee is made and how homes are structured. You are probably beginning to appreciate the challenges strong AI has.

The coffee-making scenario is a challenge that Steve Wozniak (yes, Apple’s Steve Wozniak) devised as a test for a strong AI machine. Just like the Turing test we mentioned in the previous chapter, it is a way to verify whether anything close to human-level intelligence has been reached. The catch is that even if you do build a machine that is able to enter any house and pre-pare a cup of coffee (which, incidentally, we are not anywhere close to achieving), it will fail woefully the minute you ask it to change a light bulb. In fact, many argue that even this test is not a sufficiently good test of strong AI. A crucial skill of general intelligence is the ability to transfer knowledge from one domain to the other, something that humans seem uniquely capa-ble of doing. This quote from the “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” captures this nicely for me.

A bee exhibits competence at building hives; a beaver exhibits competence at building dams; but a bee doesn’t build [a] dam, and a beaver can’t learn to build a hive. A human, watching, can learn to do both; but that is a unique ability among biological lifeforms.2

Strong AI is trying to tackle questions that go straight to the core of who we are as humans. Needless to say, if we ever do build machines that are so capable, we will have a very interesting further set of questions to answer.

As such, the debate is fascinating from a philosophical, political, and social perspective. From a scientific perspective the search is certainly worthwhile. From a “how can AI help me get the work I have in front of me today done?” perspective, strong AI is not where we need to be focusing.

We will, instead, focus on weak or narrow AI. This is AI that is trying to build machines that are able to solve problems in well-defined domains. Similar to the expert systems of the early 1980s with their “few” thousands of rules, the goal of these AI machines is to solve delimited problems and demonstrate their value early and clearly. What differs from the 1980s is that we now have the computing power, data, and techniques to build systems that can solve problems without us having to explicitly articulate all the rules.

2 Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” in The Cambridge Handbook of Artif icial Intelligence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 316–334.

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In addition, instead of diving straight into technologies and providing taxono-mies of the different types of machine learning or symbolic reasoning approaches, we are going to take a different path. Since intelligence is such a hard thing to pin down, we are going to look at the qualities or behaviors a system displays and use those to understand it. We are going to draw on ideas from agent-oriented computing, a field of AI that occupies itself with building software wherein the core unit of abstraction is an agent. We will explore what sort of behaviors our agents (i.e., our software) can have, and how these behaviors combine to lead to increasingly more sophisticated software.

An Agent-Based View of AIPerspective has the powerful capability to define how you are able to under-stand a problem. Approaching AI from an agent-oriented view liberates us from many of the challenges of definition that AI presents while providing us with a solid conceptual framework to guide us throughout.

A simple way to describe agent-based software engineering is that it is a com-bination of software engineering and AI. It studies how AI practitioners have been building software and attempts to identify common traits and patterns to inform the practice of building AI applications.

It concerns itself with how intelligent programs (agents) can be structured and provides ways to model and reason about the behavior of single agents and the interactions between agents. Although we are not dealing specifically with software engineering in this book, the concepts and abstractions help us understand any AI technology and, crucially, the impact it can have on our processes.

A key reason for taking an agent-based view is that we can consider what the agent is doing without having to consider how it achieves it. In other words, we don’t need to wonder about what specific AI technique the agent is using to achieve its task. Too often, discussions get lost in the details of what neural network or what statistical technique or what symbolic logics or, worse still, what programming language is being used and whether that counts as AI or not. This allows camps to be formed about what is “true” AI and what is not. Very often in these cases, “true” AI is whatever technique the person claiming truth is most fond of or familiar with, and everything else is somehow lesser.

■ An agent-based view of AI applications allows us to consider what the application is doing,

without having to concern ourselves with how it is achieving it.

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While we will look at some of the basics of these approaches, in general we shouldn’t care how the problem is solved. Technologies evolve and ways to solve problems change. If you follow AI developments, even tangentially, you soon realize that every day, week, and month brings forth new announce-ments and new amazing architectures. Trying to keep track of it all, unless you are a practitioner in that specific subfield, is a losing game.

We should always distinguish the what from the how and focus on the impor-tant aspects for us. If you are researching neural net architectures, solving a problem with neural nets is the important aspect. If you simply want to know if there is a cat in a picture, the most important aspect is that you get reliable answers. How you get there is secondary.

The other reason an agent-based view helps is that we don’t need to actually define intelligence. As we’ve mentioned a few times, that is not an easy task anyway. If every time we talk about the behavior of a system, we get dis-tracted by discussions about whether it is really intelligent or not, we will not get anywhere anytime soon. We will, instead, focus on what agents are trying to achieve and their interaction with the rest of their environment (including other agents).

AgentsOne of the classic textbooks on AI3 describes agents as “anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting on the envi-ronment through effectors.” It helps if you think of it as a physical robot (Figure 2-1). A robot will use sensors (cameras, GPS, etc.) to figure out where it is and what is around it, and based on that it will cause its motors (its effec-tors) to act in a way that will take it closer to where it needs to be. Crucially, how the robot decided to go left or right is not important at this point. The internal process that led from sensing to acting does not need to be known to describe what the robot is attempting to achieve.

3 Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig, Artif icial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Pearson, 2010).

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Of course, the robot is moving in a certain way because it is trying to achieve something. There is some desirable state of affairs that it is trying to bring about, such as exit a room or transport an object. We call this desirable state of affairs its goal.

■ A goal is a desirable state of affairs in the environment—a state that we can describe using

attributes of that environment.

Goals are crucial in defining agency. It is the why that drives what we are doing. Why did the robot turn left? Well, it is trying to get to an object that is to its left, and so on. As such, the definition of an agent for our purposes is that an agent is something that is attempting to achieve a goal through its capabilities to effect change in the environment it is in.

■ An agent is something that is attempting to achieve a goal through its capabilities to effect

change in the environment it is in.

The originators of this agent-based perspective, Professors Michael Luck and Mark d’Inverno, give a conceptual and fun example to illustrate this viewpoint. In a paper titled “A Formal Framework for Agency and Autonomy,”4 they use

4 Michael Luck and Mark d’Inverno, “A Formal Framework for Agency and Autonomy” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, eds. Victor Lesser and Les Gasser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) pp. 254–260.

Figure 2-1. Agent as a robot receiving inputs and effecting change

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the example of a simple coffee cup as something that can be an agent. A cup, they propose, can be considered an agent in certain circumstances where we can ascribe it a specific purpose (i.e., a goal). For example, when the cup is being used to hold liquid, it is achieving our goal of having somewhere to keep our coffee. Once it stops serving that purpose, it stops being an agent for us.

I was very attracted by this viewpoint of agency as I was starting out my own PhD research, precisely because it provided a solid foothold and avoided vague definitions. As a result, I further delved into their original framework in an attempt to construct a methodology that would help us not only describe agent systems but also build them.

In my work, I extended the overall framework to provide a few more catego-ries that would allow us to more easily describe software as agents. The cof-fee cup is an example of what I called a passive agent. It is passive because it has no internal representation of the goal it is attempting to achieve. In fact, it is the owner of the coffee cup who recognizes that the coffee cup can play a useful role because of its capability to hold liquid in one place, and it is the owner of the coffee cup who knows how to manipulate the coffee cup (pour liquid in, hold it upright, and raise it to take a sip).

■ A passive agent has no internal representation of a goal. It is left entirely to the user to

understand how to manipulate the passive agent’s capabilities in order to achieve a goal.

Passive agents are our baseline. It is the software that doesn’t take any initia-tive, and doesn’t do anything unless we explicitly start manipulating it. While this may sound like a purely theoretical concept with little practical applica-tion, it actually describes the majority of software we use right now. Most applications are not actively aware of what we are trying to achieve. They provide us their myriad menus and submenus, buttons, and forms to fill out and it is left to us to understand how we should manipulate them to achieve our goals. Setting this baseline and having it as a starting point that describes most software today gives us something to build on to describe software that is powered by AI techniques.

Active AgentsNow, let us take it a step further. If we have passive agents, it means that we must also have active agents. Active agents are those that do have an internal representation of a desirable state of affairs. They are actively trying to achieve something. The simplest such agent could be a thermostat. A thermostat can sense the temperature of a room (perceives the environment) and switches

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off the heating when the desired temperature is reached (causes a change to the environment).

■ An active agent has an internal representation of a goal and uses its capabilities to achieve

that goal.

Active agents put us on the path of the type of AI we are interested in, where we are delegating decision-making to machines. In this case, we are letting the thermostat decide when to switch the heating on or off in order to get to a desired temperature.

“Hold on there,” I hear you say. “A thermostat is AI? I thought AI is about hard problems!?” That is a very sensible statement. Remember, however, that we are trying to build a framework that will help us deal with all sorts of situ-ations without any vague assumptions of “complexity.” Do not get hung up on “hard problems” or “complicated situations.” Everything lies on a continuum, and we will get there in time. The important thing about the thermostat is that it perceives its environment and reacts to changes in the environment by switching the heating on and off. What helps it decide exactly when to react may be a dumb switch (“if room temperature greater than 25 Celsius switch the heating off”) or it could be the most finely tuned neural net-work model that has learned the percentage by which it should increase or decrease heat output so as to maximize energy usage while optimizing com-fort. Remember, we don’t care about the how, just the what.

From a business process perspective, the most valuable thing is that the task of managing the temperature has been delegated to an automated process. It is no longer required that a human being keeps checking on the temperature and, based on that, decide whether the heating should be switched on or off or the heat output increased or decreased.

■ From a business perspective, active agents or active software indicates tools that we can

delegate decision-making tasks to.

This is perhaps the single most important lesson of this chapter. Deciding to use AI in a work environment is deciding to delegate a decision-making task to a software program. At its core it is no different than the decision most companies make without blinking about delegating key aspects of financial forecasting to spreadsheets or key aspects of resource planning to ERP (enter-prise resource planning) software. In plain words, AI is a way to achieve auto-mation. Where AI differs from a lot of the existing software is that it broadens

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the scope of the type of tasks we can automate. It does that because AI technologies allow us to build software programs that are increasingly better at identifying what the correct decisions are in scenarios where it was not previously possible.

■ The introduction of AI in a work environment is the process of identifying what decisions can

be delegated to a software agent.

When we introduce AI in an environment, we introduce software agents that make decisions in an automated fashion. In this section we talked about the thermostat acting as an active agent and how it could either be a very simple device or a more complex system. The agent is moving toward the same goal (regulate temperature) but with differing capabilities. We call the ability of an agent to vary how to employ its capabilities to achieve a specific goal self-direction.

Self-Directed AgentsTo better understand self-direction, let us consider the notification system on our phones. You can conceptualize it as a software agent whose task is to receive a notification (input from the environment) and pass that message on to you (effecting change in the environment that achieves its goal).

A simple version of this notifier agent is one where every time a message reaches your phone (for any application on your phone) it simply gets dis-played on the screen. That is it. I am sure most would agree that as far as AI goes, this is definitely on the lower end of the spectrum.

Now consider an agent that, when the message arrives to your device, refers to your notification preferences, considers your current context (e.g., is it past a certain time, are you at a certain location, what type of message is it, who is sending the message?). Based on all of that, the agent decides the most appro-priate course of action (e.g., show on screen, play a sound, show message on a different device like a watch). Hopefully, you agree that there are plenty of opportunities for “intelligent” action in this scenario. There is an active consid-eration of the situation, which can lead to a number of different outcomes.

Both agents serve the same purpose. Namely, notify the user of messages. Some agents, however, may perform the same action irrespective of current or past behavior, user preferences, or context. Other agents make a number of decisions and have a number of choices as to how to achieve their goal. The software program stops being a dumb pipe and turns into an active participant in the process. That is why we call this ability to vary action and outputs based on internal decision-making self-direction.

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■ Self-direction is the ability of an agent to vary the ways in which it achieves its goals.

The more self-direction we require of an agent, the more AI techniques we will need to employ to achieve it. We need the ability to reason about the world, review potentially large amounts of data, and decide which action to perform based on all of that.

Even then, it is not a simple on/off switch. Now you have AI; now you don’t. Everything lies on a continuum, as Figure 2-2 illustrates. The more complexity we introduce into this decision-making process, the more contextual and historical information we need to take into account, and the more AI tech-niques we will have to use.

What is essential at this point is to appreciate that from a certain high-level process perspective, it is not a question of differing levels of complexity. From a process perspective, the task has simply been delegated to a software agent. There is a piece of code that is responsible for notifying us when a message arrives. We have delegated that decision-making to software, either through explicit rules and our preferences or through more probabilistic reasoning based on context and past behavior. The question then becomes what level of self-direction is necessary from this software in order to perform its task efficiently and usefully for us.

■ AI is the process of identifying and coding decision-making skills into software programs so

that they can effectively carry out the tasks that have been delegated to them.

Autonomous AgentsThe notifier agent we have been describing so far, at any level of self-direction, can only operate within the bounds of a very specific goal: to decide when and how to display a message to the user.

Figure 2-2. The self-direction continuum

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There is another level of agency that is useful to consider: one where the agents do not just operate to achieve well-defined goals but can actually gen-erate their own goals.

Imagine your workplace has just been outfitted with the latest “intelligent” office energy management system. This system has a target of ensuring you don’t spend more than 100 “units” of energy per week and that the occupants of the workplace get the maximum amount of comfort out of those energy units. To achieve this target, it references all the available data, preferences, and rules around what constitutes efficient energy use and comfort and begins taking action. It begins formulating specific goals (desirable environmental states) that it wishes to achieve.

For example, it may decide that it should switch off certain devices because they seem to have been forgotten—switched on but not actively being used. It may also decide to just ever so slightly drop the office temperature so as to conserve energy. These are different goals that stem from its attempt to meet its higher level target. This is software with its “own” agenda and goals that is using whatever capabilities it has in order to fulfil that agenda.

Let us look at another example. Suppose you have a “wellness” agent whose target is to ensure that all members of a team get a chance to participate in company activities. This wellness agent is given certain capabilities such as access to and the ability to reason about people’s diaries, or the ability to map out relationships based on interactions through e-mails or in chat software. Using that information, it can then decide to act based on its findings. It will have to make decision such as:

“Do I move that project review meeting and affect the schedules of five people so that Alexis can join a yoga session, or do I have Alexis stay past a certain time in the office to do yoga?”

These are different goals driven by a higher level target. We call these higher level targets motivations, and the ability of agents to pick a goal in order to satisfy their motivations autonomy.

■ Autonomous agents generate or choose between different goals, using higher order

motivations.

Autonomy describes an agent’s ability to vary its decisions about what goal to achieve. As with the other concepts discussed so far, autonomy lies on a con-tinuum. Take, for example, the wellness agent from before. We said that it can monitor diaries to ensure that everyone is participating adequately in social activities. What should it do, however, if someone is not participating in social activities? This will depend on how autonomous the agent is. It could,

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for example, simply notify the line manager of the person in question to high-light the issue and leave it at that. Alternatively, it could decide to change an employee’s work schedule so that the employee can then take the opportu-nity to book some time for a social activity. It could change the work schedule and book the social activity without asking anyone’s permission.

As we introduce AI in our work processes, we need to carefully consider exactly how much autonomy we are providing. More autonomy means we are delegating more decision-making power to computer software, and we will potentially reap more efficiency out of it. It also means that we may suffer and have to deal with unintended consequences.

■ An informative example of this is the now infamous Microsoft Tay chatbot released on

Twitter. Tay was given considerable autonomy in terms of what messages it could produce and

that led to an embarrassment for Microsoft. As trolls “taught” Tay racist and extremist phrases,

the chatbot used those phrases in interactions with other people. Microsoft had to recall the bot,

blaming a “vulnerability”— the vulnerability was that Tay had no constraints on what it could say

and no guidance as to the quality of what it learned.

Before moving on, I want to reiterate the different levels. We will use this terminology throughout the book, so it’s useful to make sure we have it all well laid out.

• Agents are software programs that have some capabilities and can effect change in their environment through those capabilities. The desired change is called a goal.

• Passive agents are ascribed goals by their user. It is the user that manipulates a passive agent’s capabilities. Most software we use behaves like passive agents.

• Active agents have an explicit representation of a goal to achieve and can manipulate their own capabilities to achieve a goal.

• Self-direction refers to the agent’s ability to vary the ways in which it achieves a goal.

• Autonomy refers to the agent’s ability to choose between different goals, in service of a higher order target or motivation.

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28 Chapter 2 | What Is AI?

Agents That LearnSo far, we have talked about agents that are passive, active, and even autono-mous. Another key dimension is the agent’s ability to learn from past experiences.

Returning to the wellness agent, we can envision how, as it tries different strategies with users to get them more actively involved, it “learns” which strategies work best with which users. This adaption of its behavior to differ-ent contexts based on previous action and historical data is what we will consider as learning.

There can be any number of layers of complexity hidden behind this learning activity. The ways the agent assigns scores to different reactions and out-comes from users can become increasingly more sophisticated. It may be able to draw not just from the reaction of a single person but that of thousands of users over a long period of time. If the data grows and the variables to con-sider are multiple, it will need special tools and increasingly more sophisti-cated AI techniques to make sense of them.

Agent CommunitiesFor the sake of completeness, let us also briefly consider multiple interacting agents. This is an aspect of automation that is not often discussed but is cru-cial. No problem can be solved by a standalone piece of software. We always need to interact and integrate with other components in order to achieve our goals. This trend will only continue to accelerate.

In the near term, it is more likely that an autonomous piece of software, for example, your Siri-like phone assistant, will interact with passive services (e.g., using a timetable API to understand when the next train is coming). However, it is reasonable to assume that this will change. We will get to the point where multiple autonomous software programs will regularly interact in our daily lives and make decisions for us. At that point, we not only have to deal with how single agents arrive at a decision but also what are the emergent behav-iors of multiple agents.

It might be a group of autonomous vehicles distributing themselves in a road network or two meeting booking agents negotiating based on their owners’ agendas. Returning to our wellness example, assume that there is an agent community with the common goal of “get employees to interact more within the company.” Each individual agent, however, has differing capabilities and motivations. One agent is the Social agent with a particular focus on social activities, while a Health agent is more concerned with helping users maintain a healthy lifestyle in and out of work. The Social agent may suggest that a user should take one less trip to the gym and spend that time instead doing a more

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social activity. The Health agent would then have to weigh the pros and cons of this. Perhaps they even enter a negotiation to decide how to settle the issue. They might settle on setting up a game of tennis to satisfy both social and health needs!

A lot of research in agent-based computing focuses on how to get agents to coordinate to collectively solve problems, and how we can reason about the behavior of a group of agents. The more heterogeneous the types of agents interacting, the more complex the problems can become.

Moving Beyond IntelligenceIn this chapter we explored the very concept of AI, provided some examples of the challenges around trying to pin it to any single definition, and also dis-tinguished between general AI and domain-specific AI.

We then referred to agent-based computing as a source of a conceptual grounding for thinking about AI, with a focus on the observable behavior and not the specific techniques that will allow us to create those behaviors. This grounding allows us to consider the task at hand, the delegation of decision-making to machines, without having to make explicit reference to notions of intelligence. Moving past vague notions of intelligence clarifies thinking.

At the same time, the agent-based perspective we introduced here needs some time to embed. Take an application you consider to be an example of AI and try to classify it from the viewpoint of agents. What goals is it trying to achieve? What information is it using? What decisions can it make? To what extent can it autonomously effect change? Does it interact with any other applications? In what ways does it interact?

I find these sorts of exercises extremely useful to start reasoning about prob-lems and the extent to which we are really delegating decision-making power and automating. The more confident you become in analyzing problems through this lens, the more adept you will be in talking with AI practitioners about what you need to see happen.

Your business goal is unlikely to ever be to have an application built that uses the latest neural network architecture.5 It will hopefully be defined according to a specific problem you are facing in the workplace and associated to clear objectives about how to improve the way things get done. That is the what we most care about. Concepts such as active and passive agency, self-direction, and autonomy help us capture the what in clear terms across a range of dif-ferent domains. The how comes next and will be the subject of the next couple of chapters.

5 Unless you are looking to raise VC money, that is!

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